1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to web browsers. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for fulfilling browser requests from a local cache.
2. Related Art
In recent years, computer users have begun to use web-based applications to perform various computational tasks. These web-based applications provide a number of advantages. For example, web-based applications allow a user to access his or her data from any computer or device that has a web browser and network access. Web-based applications also have minimal impact on client resources, which is a significant advantage for resource-constrained computing devices. However, web-based applications have one major drawback: they do not operate efficiently, or in many cases at all, without the presence of a network connection.
In order to facilitate offline browsing, browsers typically provide a caching mechanism which enables web pages that are delivered to the browser to be stored in a browser's local cache. At some subsequent time, if the user attempts to view a previously viewed page and the client does not have a connection to the web server that hosted the web page, the browser can retrieve a copy of the web page from its local cache and can display the copy of the web page to the user.
However, the browser's local cache is not sufficient to reliably run the client-side of a web-based application without network connectivity. Additionally, such caching does not facilitate handling query arguments or conditionally serving local cached resources based on browser cookies.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for executing the client-side of a web-based application without the problems listed above.